Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney

I really like Alice Feeney's writing style. Her first book I read was Daisy Darker, and I would say Good Bad Girl is less of a page-turning thriller. But it was still a great, twisty character exploration. Feeney brings the reader along through the slow-burn development of the plot as we get to know the characters. She is fantastic in writing relationships and the underlying complications.

The narrators did a fantastic job.

I would highly recommend!

Thank you to #NetGalley and #MacmillanAudio for a free copy of Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney. All opinions are my own.

What a fun mystery filled with family drama! The narrators did a great job and I really enjoyed the way the ending came together.

Alice Feeney's Good Bad Girl was a fun romp. Four women, one murder, Three suspects. And twenty years after a baby was stolen and never found. But it's all related. A wonderful romp, by a master of twist. You think you know the characters and know exactly what has happened, but it's Alice Feeley, so you know there is some twist. And this one has several. i listened to a pre-release audiobook version provided by the publisher through Netgalley. Highly recommend the book.

The audiobook was great, but I almost think I'd really like this one more in print or kindle, as there were a few times I wanted to go back to see what I missed.

Amazing and so twisty! I was enthralled and couldn't put this down to just focus on my day. Oops. I loved the narration and the story. Thank you for the ARC.

Thank you netgalley for providing an audio copy to this book. I am sure this book would have been great had I read it, however the audio was just spectacular. The different characters, the seamless back and forth, stringing along the story. Highly recommend. I was very entertained and engrossed.

I thought I knew where Good Bad Girl was headed and then I was SHOCKED with twist followed by twist… the intrigue, the mystery, the suspense and the epic twist(s) throughout made this such a fun read.

I listened to the audiobook and loved the narration. Of Alice Feeney’s books, this has been my favorite so far!

Thanks to NetGalley for sharing the audiobook in exchange for my honest review.

Highly recommend for all my mystery-loving friends!

I was given an ARC by NetGalley.

Wow, Feeney does it again! I loved this book. I really love the twist and turns and how Feeney manages to write a story that leads you down all the right and wrong roads!

I guessed some of the truths, others blew me away!

The book is narrated in four different POVs. Frankie, Patience, Edith, and Clio. Four women at different stages of life whose lives tangled get tangled in one murder.

Frankie works at a women’s prison and has a daughter who ran away almost a year ago.
Edith is living in an elderly care facility. She hates it there and hates her daughter for leaving her there. Clio is the daughter, she is also a psychologist that practices from her little pink house. Then there is Patience, an 18-year-old working at the elderly care facility where Edith lives.

The four women seemingly have nothing in common, but the skillful and innovative web that Feeney creates leads to the entangled truth of how these women are connected and how their lives will change forever.

This is my fourth book by Alice Feeney and like all the books I have read by her, this is a slow suspense thriller that keeps you guessing till the end. Feeney explores themes of postpartum depression, motherhood, kidnapping, and death, and how each can affect a woman's life for years after those experiences.

Masterfully done!

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for an advanced audio copy of Good Bad Girl.

I am a huge Alice Feeney fan, but unfortunately, this missed the mark for me. It was wildly confusing, so much so I spent so much time trying to make sure I knew what was going on that I couldn't get lost in the story. This was nothing like her other books, which were all page-turners. This one was rather boring. The mystery was lackluster, no suspense. I didn't care for any of the characters. I'll continue to be a fan and will look forward to her next book.

LOVED this, the characters, the twists and turns, the slow unraveling. The plot twist really caught me by surprise which i love. i love how everything came together so perfectly at the end, wrapped up with a perfect bow.

This is the story of four women: Frankie, Edith, Clio, and Patience. Frankie is a librarian at a prison. Edith is an eighty-year-old woman living in a nursing home. Clio is Edith’s estranged daughter. Patience is an eighteen-year-old woman working at Edith's nursing home. Somehow these four women are all connected. That’s as much as I can say without revealing any plot twists.

Feeney definitely did not disappoint with this one. It is full of twists and turns that will keep you guessing throughout the book. I listened to the audiobook of this one and it was amazing. The two narrators did a great job distinguishing between the four points of view. It was obvious which character was talking in each chapter and not confusing. I highly recommend it to anyone that enjoys thrillers. I give it 4.5/5 stars.

Entertaining audiobook that kept my attention through all the twists and turns, and there were many. Several seemingly disjunct parts of the story ended up coming together. Interesting characters, caught up in the weirdness that sometimes makes up lives, gave a satisfying read.

There is so much to unpack in this audiobook by Alice Feeney. Good Bad Girl is my first Feeney and I was expecting a physically darker book due to the synapsis or my interpretation of it. Instead, Feeney gives us a disturbing psychological thriller that plays on a mother’s worst nightmare of her child being kidnapped.

There are multiple voices here which build the multi-layered mystery. Feeney delves into parental abuse, neglect, dementia, mental health, and homelessness. There are other issues that glance the pages and impact without the deep dive.

I don’t know if I like any of the characters (chuckle). I don’t think this story is about likable characters, but about the impact of decisions made at one time in one’s life that would not be made with forethought or life experience. Feeney takes us on a whirlwind of emotions for the characters as death follows them along with the detective trying to solve the cases.

Katherine Press and Stephanie Racine narrate Good Bad Girl. Their voices are similar and were at times difficult for me to tell apart which made orienting myself to the action taking place when I paused the book or left it for some time. Their pacing was good, and I only heard one mispronunciation.

All I can say is that you need to pay attention and you will guess it all beforehand. Good Bad Girl is a deep dive into parental loss and the consequences surrounding life choices that Feeney turns into a dark and thrilling mystery.

This book was ok. The dual POV’s and timelines got really confusing. At times the story felt slow and dragged on a bit. I enjoyed the last 25% of the book when everything starts piecing together. I listened to this as an audiobook and did enjoy the use of multiple narrators. I enjoyed the story but do not believe it will be one that sticks with me. I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys a slow burn thriller.

Thank you to MacMillian Audio and NetGalley for my copy of the audiobook. This does not affect my opinion regarding this book.

Read Completed 7/31/23 | 3.5 stars

Alice Feeney always comes in with a good twist and GOOD BAD GIRL was no exception! It took me a while to figure out where things were headed and things just kept getting deeper and deeper towards the end.

This was a really solid book but just not my favorite Alice Feeney. I struggled to connect to the characters a bit and the book just flew by -- even after finishing, I'm still not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that I was halfway through without even realizing it. I was waiting for something more to start happening and for it to stop feeling like an intro, and yet, it was easy to breeze through and didn't drag.

There are a lot of people who eventually get POVs and when they just kept coming, I just didn't know how many people we were going to be keeping track of. I really don't think we needed so many and I think it prevented me from really getting involved in anyone's story as much as I had hoped. It felt more like I was just watching it all from afar instead of being involved in the story and pulled into these characters' lives.

This was very much about mother-daughter relationships in many ways and because of the way it was written, it got a little exhausting rehashing this concept over and over again in the book. I'm also a bit tired of the mother-baby concept in thrillers, despite it being an obvious choice for so many struggles.

I did enjoy the read but by the time I got to the end, we had already been winding around from here to there, jumping from person to person, and throwing in so many accusations that some of the twists were like, "Yeah, whatever." I almost forgot they were even happening. It was also a nice ending and I'm usually not a fan of the nice ending in thrillers. Makes it less sinister.

Wow, how I loved Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney, it's a five star ⭐ read. My first was Daisy Darker, which was also amazing. This is a very wonderful mystery with drama & love intertwined. So many amazing words that are so memorable. Some that I'll remember are;
"Life without dreams is a slow kind of death."

"We all build our own prisons constructed from bricks of fears and invisible bars".

"Mother knows best, but sometimes it's best mother doesn't know."

As I heard this in the book,
"Before a rainbow 🌈
It must always rain🌧️,
my 3 year old grandson tells me that it rained, and that a rainbow would come out.
Wow, what a coincidence.

I liked the way Alice Feeney brought fun information about numbers, which I enjoyed learning. I had to go down a rabbit hole & look up numbers like 6 & 4 to see what it's considered in China. Very interesting 🤔.

I enjoyed the audiobook version. The narration by Katherine Press & Stephanie Racine is perfect. They both do a wonderful job with these well written characters Clio, Patience, Frankie, and Edith, they are perfect or are they. I highly recommend reading or listening to this awesome story. It will bring a tear to your eye and also a smile 😊 to your face. You will love the surprise ending.

(4 walls, 3 windows, 2 chairs, 1 women in the pink house).

(3 suspect, 2 murders, 1 victim)

"Sometimes bad things happen to good people, so good people have to do bad things".

Thank you NetGalley & Flatiron Books for the digital audio copy in exchange for my honest opinion & review.

Publication Day August 29, 2023
#AliceFeeney
#GoodBadGirl
#NetGalley
#FlatironBooks

I’m not sure how I felt about this one! Nothing was truly shocking to me and there’s a good chance it’s because I listened on audio. Thrillers on audio are hard especially where there’s more than two POVs…

Sometimes bad things happen to good people, so god people have to do bad things.

Patience ran away from home when she turned 18. Now she works at a care home for minimal pay "off the books", where her best friend is a patient there, Edith.

Edith hates the care home, and cannot forgive her daughter, Cleo, for putting her in the home.

Cleo blames her mother for how her life has turned out, losing her daughter, and her husband.

Frankie works at the jail, but has decided that she must do something to find her daughter...

All of the stories are intertwined, and Feeney does a wonderful job of slowly unveiling the tapestry of their interconnected lives. At each reveal, there is another twist and turn to add to the complexity of the character's lives.

This was a great choice for an audiobook, the story was easy to follow, and the narration was clear and enjoyable to listen.

Narrator was excellent. Got a little lost between all the female characters but the twist tied that up nicely. AF does not disappoint.

Alice Feeney has been one of my favorite authors since the first time I picked up a book of hers. So I had a feeling it would be a good one and she definitely didn't let me down.
This was such good book! At first the multiple povs startled me, but I just love the narrators and they are great at being able to depict the characters voices so well.
I love when you think you know what's going on, but you have no idea! The plot, twists, characters, narrators and story were all great. Once you pick it up, it'll be hard to put it down.

3 out of 5 Stars

It was bad but it was one of the least thrilling thrillers, I've ever read and was a little too predictable.